Databases have typically been split into two camps: analytical systems for spotting trends and answering business questions, and operational systems for day-to-day records like orders and payments. Munich-based CedarDB handles both, and co-founder and CEO Moritz Sichert told TechCrunch that the approach has become more relevant with the rise of agentic AI.

CedarDB has been in development for a decade, but its current momentum comes from enterprises whose data stacks handle years of transactions well yet struggle to quickly answer analytical questions asked in natural language.

The company is a Technical University of Munich spinout built on Umbra, a research project designed from scratch to beat legacy database engines by exploiting modern hardware. With five Umbra researchers as co-founders, CedarDB promises faster performance without more CPUs, processing power or memory, and with few customer changes. It is compatible with PostgreSQL, which keeps switching costs low since users don't need to rebuild apps, Sichert said. That compatibility also follows the logic LLMs are most familiar with from training.

Co-founder Christian Winter wrote in a blog post that the team prioritized reliability, fault tolerance and compatibility with popular tools after leaving academia. The team debated launching a cloud offering immediately, but instead launched CedarDB Enterprise as an on-premise offering alongside the free CedarDB Community Edition in May of last year, when it also announced a €5.3 million seed round (about $6 million).

The cloud offering was delayed, not abandoned. After beta testing with waitlist users, the company announced limited availability of CedarDB Cloud on Wednesday onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it is competing against 20 other startups in TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield.

A fully managed, cloud-hosted version will likely help CedarDB expand beyond large enterprises and better compete with the likes of Databricks, which appears to have reached the same conclusion. At its Data + AI Summit in June, Databricks cited "the agentic era" as the reason for launching LTAP, a data architecture aiming to unify transactions, analytics, streaming and operational data on a single copy of storage in the lake. Sichert sees Databricks' move as another sign of demand. CedarDB plans to serve its first cloud users with its current team of 14, but Sichert expects it will need a larger team once it gains more traction. "And this is where we would raise our next round."

Source: TechCrunch